Don’t Know Much About Capitalism
by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
After eight years of watching conservatives blow trillions of dollars and comport themselves like anti-intellectual, jingoistic blockheads, I found myself ashamed to admit that the Left seemed to have all the genuine intellectuals – people who seemed to possess real curiosity, who refused to accept whatever official line the government was shelling out, and who sought genuine understanding instead of name-calling and pointless vitriol. With the Left now in power, though, they’ve by and large reverted to form. The very same people who just a year ago prided themselves on evaluating every Pentagon press release with an air of suspicion and hostility now accept without cavil whatever the Federal Reserve chairman or the Treasury secretary tell them. They’ll believe whatever economic superstition, no matter how transparently ludicrous, that happens to be in fashion. Whatever happened to “Question Authority”? Air America host Thom Hartmann is a perfect example. His article on the economic crisis posted at the Huffington Post gets pretty much everything dead wrong, and yet his point of view is by and large the conventional wisdom. Let’s start with the economists whose ideas, according to Hartmann, led us to the current crisis. Why, they’re “Ludwig Von Mises, Freidrich [sic] Von Hayeck [sic], Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan, Tom Freidman [sic], Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Ayn Rand.” Now I’m sporting enough to look past the fact that Hartmann makes two spelling errors in a single economist’s name. Still, color me skeptical that Hartmann knows a blessed thing about the work of F.A. Hayek. (I assume he thinks these people are more or less interchangeable, that Mises = Friedman = Summers = Rubin, that Mises wouldn’t have denounced at least several of these figures, and that the differences between them are probably just trivial and not worth mentioning.) Quiz time, Thom! Name one book on economic theory (so The Road to Serfdom, if you happen to have heard of it, doesn’t count) Hayek wrote that you’ve read, flipped through, held in your hand, or even heard of. Stumped? How about one article? Stumped again? Then why not do the decent and honorable thing and shut up until you can speak from authority rather than prejudice and ignorance? Sound fair?
April 29, 2009 Thomas E. Woods, Jr. [send him mail] is senior fellow in American history at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He is the author of nine books, including two New York Times bestsellers: The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and the just-released Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse. Visit his new website. Copyright © 2009 Taki's Magazine
|
